VI. The ‘Dirty Deed’
1. Research
That may sound strange, but you can—and quite often you really, really should!—do some research before writing your smut.
Just because I have the experience of cooking and eating some excellent and a few really bad meals doesn’t mean that it won’t help me poking around some cookbooks and related websites when I want to write a scene about cooking. The same is true for sex. Just because I’ve had good sex and bad sex doesn’t mean I don’t need any new input on writing sex.
An attitude like that often leads to lazy writing, and more often than not, lazy writing turns out to be bad writing. Research can provide new ideas and new inspiration. Research can also help with the opposite problem, if you feel uncomfortable and insecure about writing a certain sex scene because you haven’t had that kind of experience and couldn’t have that experience even if you wanted to. While it’s comparatively easy to try out the meal you want to write about, changing your gender or your sexual orientation just to broaden your horizons for the sake of a sex scene is obviously not an option.
The good news: As a writer you don’t need to have experienced what you are going to write about. Women could never write male protagonists if that were true, and vice versa. Or nobody could ever write a death scene. Imagination and empathy are two of the most important tools of any writer.
But research—and a second, or maybe even a third pair of eyes—can help you a lot with writing intimate, extremely private and personal experiences in a credible manner.
Here are some things worth researching in connection with sex scenes:
- If you’re a woman: How does sex feel for men?
- If you’re writing slash: How do gay guys/Lesbian girls really do it?
- If you’re writing threesomes: How does it really work with more than one partner?
- If you’re venturing beyond plain vanilla: What is BDSM all about?
- Special circumstances: Not just the famous first time! What about sex during sickness, sex during pregnancy, sex between older people, sex with a prostitute?
- And don’t forget: Safe sex! Include it in your stories!
TIP!
- Never use sex scenes in romance novels or fanfic as the models for sexual practices and sexual situations that you have no personal experience with or knowledge of.
- Research what you want to know, write the scene the way you imagine it, and ask a friend (or two) to proofread it.
Research recommendations:
- Sexinfo (website of the University of California at Santa Barbara)
- Society for Human Sexuality
- Writing Sex – LiveJournal Community
- Minotaur’s Sex Tips for Slash Writers
- The BDSM Dictionary
- The International Encyclopaedia of Sexuality